[Distutils] PEP 517 - specifying build system in pyproject.toml

[Steve Dower]

On 25May2017 0756, Paul Moore wrote:
> On 25 May 2017 at 15:38, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> So I'm inclined to accept the encoding amendment, and then
>> provisionally accept the overall PEP pending implementation in pip.
>
> Me too. (Assuming I understand Steve's comments on backends, and he's
> comfortable with the idea that backends need to capture and manage
> MSVC output for presentation to the frontend).

Sounds like you understood my comments :) +1 overall (-0 on a formal way 
to pass logs via the disk)

As I mentioned at one point, there's a bug against the CPython test 
suite that the distutils tests show too much console output, which is 
because distutils currently just lets MSVC write directly to the 
console. To fix it, we need to capture the output and then conditionally 
display it, at which point transcoding from ANSI to UTF-8 with 'replace' 
is trivial, and saves the front end (in this case, the test suite) from 
having to guess. So it is something that the backend around MSVC needs 
to do regardless, and if the PEP says "send me UTF-8" then it's one less 
thing for the backend developer to guess.

Cheers,
Steve